Enrol a child
A child arriving at a club needs three separate things recorded, in three separate parts of PTRS: a member record with guardians and medical facts, a membership in the club itself, and a place in a program. If they will eat a CACFP meal, a fourth record too, a CACFP enrolment carrying an eligibility tier.
PTRS handles all four. This page traces them in the order they actually have to happen, and names the two connections that do not exist between them.
Every step below links to the page that actually documents it, and that page is where the detail lives. A flow page adds no instructions of its own; if a step is not already documented on its own page, nobody has checked it against PTRS.
The sequence at a glance
| # | Step | Part of PTRS | Documented in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Create the child's own record | Members | Add a child to PTRS |
| 2 | Add guardians, emergency contacts, medical facts and consents | Members | Work a child's record |
| 3 | Give the child a club membership, the five-rule safety check | Members | Add a child to PTRS |
| 4 | Enrol into a program, the licensed-capacity check | Programs | Enrol a child into a program |
| 5 | Record a CACFP enrolment and its eligibility tier | CACFP | Enrol a participant |
Steps 3, 4 and 5 are independent of each other. None of them triggers any of the others, and a child can be given any one of the three without either of the other two.
Steps 1 and 2: the record
A member record can be created three different ways, and each collects a different amount of detail: the eight-step registration wizard, the Quick Add box in the header, and, starting from a photographed paper form, Quick Scan, which is its own flow at turn a paper application into a record.
What each of the three paths actually writes, and the fields each one quietly drops, is on Add a child to PTRS. Guardians, emergency contacts, immunisations, physicals and consents are all added afterward, on the child's own record. See Work a child's record and member and guardian fields.
This matters for step 3, because the membership check reads exactly these records, and refuses to proceed without them.
Step 3: the club membership, and a check that actually enforces
Giving a child a club membership writes a record of that membership, kept separate from any place in a program.
This is one of the few places anywhere in PTRS that genuinely enforces a rule rather than just displaying a warning. It checks five safety conditions before it will save, and refuses outright, naming which condition failed, if any of them is not met:
- two emergency contacts on file
- an active emergency-hospitalisation consent
- immunisations marked current
- a physical exam within the past year
- every emergency medication on file cleared to be given
Documented in full on Add a child to PTRS. This check refuses the save outright; it does not merely warn and let it through.
Step 4: the program place, and the one regulatory limit
Enrolling a child into a program writes a place for them on that program's own schedule. This step runs six checks in order, and the third is the only place anywhere in PTRS where a state licence number actually changes what PTRS will allow: the site's own licensed capacity, read from its OCCL-issued figure, and counted as the number of distinct children with an active enrolment in any program at that site.
The whole sequence, check by check, is at what happens when a child is enrolled. Three things from it belong on a flow page.
The capacity check guards only one of three paths that can enrol a child. Enrolling many children at once, and promoting someone off a waitlist, both write to the very same record, and neither one runs this check; promoting off a waitlist runs no capacity check at all. Both sit on the very same screen as the one path that is actually protected. See the protection is one path in three.
No age rule is enforced anywhere at all, not on the child's own record and not here. A program's own age range is stored and never actually read by any decision PTRS makes. A complete eligibility check exists and nothing, neither this step nor any screen, ever actually calls it. See what is not checked.
An enrolment made by mistake is permanent as far as any screen is concerned. The action that would withdraw a child is complete and correct, and nothing calls it. See getting a child back out.
Step 5: the CACFP enrolment
Recording a CACFP enrolment attaches a child to a site, a program and a program year, with an eligibility tier recorded against them. The steps are on Enrol a participant.
This is where the flow visibly stops being a flow. The enrolment form has no way to pick a child by name; it has a free-text box labelled Member ID, and you paste in a long identifier copied from the address bar while looking at that child's own record. Nothing carries the child forward from step 4 automatically, and nothing carries an eligibility tier in from anywhere either.
The two connections that do not exist
This is the part a flow page exists to say, because each individual page can only see its own side of it.
The membership check and the program check never actually meet
These are two separate checks on two separate, similarly named records.
| Step 3, club membership | Step 4, program place | |
|---|---|---|
| What it writes | A record of club membership | A place on one program's own schedule |
| Checks | Five safety conditions | Six conditions, one of them a real regulatory limit |
Neither one actually runs the other. A child can be given a place in a program without any of the five safety conditions ever having been checked at all, no emergency contacts, no consent, no immunisations, and PTRS will not tell you so. The full comparison is set out at how this differs from the Members check.
The eligibility tier is typed in, not worked out
PTRS contains a genuinely correct income-application calculator: it annualises the reported income, finds the right threshold for the household size, and returns free, reduced or paid. It is described at the income application.
None of that actually reaches an enrolment. The CACFP enrolment record has a field meant to link to that income application, and a way of setting it, and nothing anywhere ever calls it, so that field stays empty on every record. The only real control over eligibility anywhere in the product is a three-choice dropdown on the enrolment form itself, defaulting to free. See none of it reaches an enrolment.
And the tier does not actually change what gets paid: the one reimbursement calculation that actually runs looks up the free rate for every single meal, whatever tier is recorded. See the reimbursement arithmetic.
So a record reading "Tier: Free, Method: Income Application" is simply an assertion by whoever filled in the form. PTRS holds nothing behind it, and a CACFP reviewer will ask for whatever does.
What nobody is told
No step in this flow notifies anybody, and that has nothing specifically to do with these three parts of PTRS. PTRS has never created a notification of any kind, through any channel, and its own message sending is recorded to a log only, on every installation covered by this documentation. See Notifications.
A guardian is not told their child was enrolled. Nothing in the Parent Portal announces it, and a guardian account cannot even be linked to a child in the first place. See how your account is linked to your child.
What to do about it
Do step 3 before step 4, on purpose. Nothing enforces that order, and step 3 is the only one that actually checks a child is safe to have on site.
Use the ordinary enrol action rather than enrolling many children at once, when you are close to a site's licensed capacity; enrolling many at once does not check it.
Check the child's own age yourself. No screen will do it for you.
Record how the tier was actually determined in a note, and keep the paper behind it. The tier field on its own is not evidence. See Write a note.
Do not tell a family that PTRS has notified them of anything. It has not.
Related
- Members overview, Programs overview, CACFP overview
- Program and enrolment fields
- Enrolment and eligibility fields
- Run a service day, what happens once the child is enrolled
Checked against PTRS on 7 September 2026.